Nolin River Nursery has several persimmon varieties I’m interested in trying, but they don’t sell scions (or at least they didn’t a few years ago), and $40 is a lot just to try a variety, especially when I’d rather just graft onto my own already established volunteer trees anyway. Has anyone bought persimmons from Nolin River? Are there other places to source some of their varieties? It looks like England’s sells scions for Miller and Red Fern has Evelyn, but that’s it, at least of the ones that particularly interested me, the others being Craggs, Janet, Delight, and Munich. Most of these varieties are listed as coming from Indiana or other states besides Kentucky (where Nolin River Nursery is). I wonder where he got all these varieties from. Maybe they were more common when he first sourced them years ago.
I am not familiar…the one thing i WILL say is i am a cheapa$$; a lot of off varieties i refuse to try at like $40 a pop others here have gobbled up without a second thought.
I dont begrudge them in the least, and am glad braver souls are dabbling. My point would be more that there are lots of folks dabbling in fruits here and yet if you search any “favorite persimmon” thread here you dont see the ones you mentioned—i have heard nolin Sells nice plants but doubt the knes you mentioned are obscure for a lack of sampling…
I would buy from nolin without question…but i would buy prok. Or yates. Or any of the fruits noted to be especially good elsewhere.
If I only had room for a few trees I wouldn’t be interested in any of these varieties I’ve asked about, but there are several reasons these varieties interest me.
One is that the varieties commonly considered the best mostly ripen pretty early, and I feel like I have enough season length to ripen varieties that ripen quite a bit later, potentially extending my persimmon season, which I’d like to do.
Another reason is that one or two of the varieties I mentioned are listed as being nearly or mostly seedless or having few seeds, and that’s a trait that especially interests me, probably more than size, size being a trait that seems to have been heavily selected for in the most popular varieties. Just in general, I’m interested in varieties that people with potentially different selection criteria have selected as superior varieties.
Thirdly, it seems like a lot of the most popular varieties are related, a lot of them coming from or having roots in the Claypool breeding program and/or being related to Early Golden, and I’m interested in trying other outstanding wild selections to see and taste a broader selection of persimmons, even if the most popular varieties are overall the best. Of course, the ones commonly considered the best are easy enough to find from multiple sources.
Fourthly, I’ve noticed that some of the local persimmon trees I’ve been impressed by enough to graft from often are very slow to begin fruiting, even though the original trees are very productive. I can see varieties like that not getting to be very popular and excitement for varieties like that simply stalling out before word spreads about them, even though they might be really good trees in the long term. If that’s true of some of these varieties and combined with a $40 starting price (before shipping, I believe), I wonder if some of these varieties aren’t better varieties than their popularity would indicate.
Everyone I know that has gotten trees from Nolin River has had nothing but very positive things to say, so it does seem like a very good nursery. Unfortunately, my understanding is that the owner is planning to retire before much longer and that that may be the end of the business.
The only time I’ve gone to Nolin’s website, they were out of everything I had any interest in.
So, I assume business is good.
Hi Eric,
The owner of Nolin River, John Brittan, is going to work for a while. He was going to throw in the towel but has decided to go on ‘at least for a while.’ I think should I be remembering correctly that he was talking like another 5-7 years and that was talking to him near this time last year. He does not sell scions, no.
Dax